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Recidivist Robb, the special flower

Malcolm Turnbull and top cabinet ministers have been slapped with a stinging rebuke from a former senior colleague over their plan to target “covert” agents who work for foreign ­powers, amid a political storm over Chinese influence in national affairs.

Former trade minister Andrew Robb, who masterminded John Howard’s 1996 election victory, warned the Prime Minister and other members of the national ­security committee of federal cabinet against fuelling a “smear” against his name that suggests “treasonous” activity because he advises a Chinese company.

The letter to the nation’s security ministers, obtained by The Australian, challenges the government’s claims and appears certain to escalate concerns about new criminal penalties on those who fail to sign up to a register of people working for foreign ­entities.

It also comes as the government last night moved to refer Labor senator Sam Dastyari to the privileges committee to investigate whether he has used his time in parliament to act as an agent for the Chinese government in return for taking money.

Attorney-General George Brandis was granted permission from the Senate President to refer Senator Dastyari to the committee, which has the power to apply jail terms of up to six months.

Mr Robb really sees himself as some kind of special flower. This is not about him, what he did and didn’t do at Landbridge. This is about the system itself. We can’t have folks with hyper-sensitive national security information running off to work for foreign powers and their firms the moment they feel like it, as Robb did, in clear breach of the Ministerial code of conduct.

Whether Robb has actually committed treason is an entirely irrelevant argument to the creation of the foreign agent register (though it is a secondary question of concern that deserves an investigation). The point today is that Robb’s behaviour has made it much easier for someone else coming after, who may or may not have the same scruples, to race off and divulge whatever the Hell they feel like.

Thus, in putting himself forward as some poor persecuted soul in order to undermine the progress of the register, he is committing precisely the same violation of the public trust that got him into hot water in the first place.

If Recidivist Robb gave a damn about his country, party and own reputation he would at this point declare his innocence but resign explicitly in the national interest from Landbridge.

The only good thing is that when Robb ,Sino Sam ,Carr ,Brumby Hawke ,Keating and countless others have finally achieved the great dream of full Asian integration and a takeover by China they might not like Chinese law . A quick bullet to the back of the head if they displease their new masters .
Now would that not be delicious justice ?

Nice one Ermo …very apt …….
loved DiCaprio in that role too ……in some ways we still have characters like that about

Reminds me of many years ago visiting a colleague in the Deep South who worked for a famous multinational and survived for 45 years in the political environment that they breed.
I asked him at dinner one night …………..” so tell me Fred ….how did you survive all these years and draw that nice salary ? ”
He looked around to see if anyone in earshot ….
Leaned over to me and said in a hushed voice ….”Ahs …a good nigger boss ” ………..( he was a white good ole boy too )

Andrew Robb assisted in selling off the port of Darwin to a foreign power. 6 months after completing that deal he retired from politics and started receiving $800K a year as a part time employee/director of Landbrige, the company that purchased the port.

How is this not working for a foreign power at the expense of Australian national security? Its a PORT. A major piece of infrastructure and an entry point for any form of hostile conflict.

Why Robb has not been investigated for treason or at the very least, working against the national interest, defies all logic.

He’s probably talking through the lense of his top 10 politician housing portfolio. And why aren’t you listening kids, you can get one of those if you save for about 5 million years and there’s no tax changes or financial oppression (but you’ll be test tube slime like Mr Robb).

How will he survive without the $880,000 p/a is what he doing the numbers on. If he had a conscience he’d resign, and live on the gold pension + perks. The thing is they don’t see the problem and that is sickening thing.

His knee jerk reaction tells me he has something to hide. Once his name is on a register and either the media start talking or looking at him or ASIO start looking at him that seems like something he is trying to avoid. What is he hiding I wonder.

He is unlikely to be hiding anything. AS SM said below, this of him as ‘captured’, or as ‘convert’ using my argument. He actually ‘believes’ that what he is doing is in the best interests of Australia.

His protests are authentic indignation at people suggesting that his core belief, ‘what is good for China is good for Australia’, is incorrect. It does not hurt that ‘believing’ this ‘fact’, has worked out very well for him professionally. He thinks he is doing the right thing, his conduct is good, and as such is prospering in life.

Counter-intuitively, the less one bribes an agent the more likely it is that the agent will align his or her own beliefs to match your objectives, possibly even to the extent that further bribery is unnecessary.

To be effective in governmental this requires the ability to bribe agents (politicians and senior public servants) at a very LOW level over a long period of time until they have reconciled their cognitive dissonance to such an extent that they would never conceive of themselves as doing anything wrong.

When these people say they are acting in the “national interest”, they may well be saying what they truly believe. But because “national interest” is not objectively definable, their own conception of it will long since have become aligned with the interests of their captors.

That is exactly what it happening: think of it as the moist robot hypothesis.

The input mechanism is different, its not a upload and done, it is a repeated-take-action cycle. We know doing the same actions repeatedly increases your emotional anchor to that action, it basically works the same way.

A simple example is say the Islamic call to prayer, why do it 5 times a day? Because it reinforces the rest of the stuff by anchoring the individual into the framework. A more complex example, staying with our religion of peace friends, is the injunction that changing the Koran is heresy because it is ‘literally’ the word of god. You should try to understand this as a error-correction codec or algorithm, not that different from embedding patterns in electronic communication to maintain data fidelity; the point is it is designed to work on humans as opposed to computers.

Re Robb, don’t think of him as a traitor, cause that is not what he is. He is a convert, and he is proselytizing. And I understand that the CCP is not a religion, but if Xi is any good, 5 bucks says he establishes a cult of personality like Mao and your argument comes moot (aside from the fact that Communism is a fork of late Victorian Protestantism, and Chinese Communism is a fork of normal communism). Think of it as a new religion in the process of establishing its sainthood. Much like Gandhi and MLK for Universal Protestantism, which later forked into Progressivism.

@T I lost you here:
“aside from the fact that Communism is a fork of late Victorian Protestantism“

Hmmm.

Maybe our pollies have been reading too much of The Secret and have been visualising their bank accounts filling up with $$$ and think CCP is the answer to their prayers..

From my perspective their continual poor behaviour is a relief.. because it makes it easier for if and when an alternative comes along. Especially if that alternative has managed to structure itself so as not to need donations and can run just on a basic membership fee.

Yeah – worded that badly. Just meant a Xi cult of personality is a logical consequence of the fact that Chinese Communism came from European Communism, which in turn came from Victorian Protestantism.

‘Maybe our pollies have been reading too much of The Secret and have been visualising their bank accounts filling up with $$$ and think CCP is the answer to their prayers..’ – I’m not so sure about this. I think a more charitable explanation is in the face of continual defeat, our pollies gave up and converted. I mean, if we can see how buggered it all is, clearly the elites have a far greater knowledge of how much worse reality is. Maintaining cog dissonance is hard, so convert.

‘From my perspective their continual poor behaviour is a relief.. because it makes it easier for if and when an alternative comes along. Especially if that alternative has managed to structure itself so as not to need donations and can run just on a basic membership fee.’ – For a long time I also thought this. But now think it is actually the inverse. The continual poor behavior is a symptom of the system failing ‘in-aggregate’. The fact that it also reduces the costs of any upstart ‘new model’ is a happy coincidence, but not a given.

Totally correct about the ‘if and when part’. You unfortunately cannot count of things continually getting worse to provide an alternative. Someone has to build a alternative, which has the ability to exploit this vulnerability. If no one comes along, things just keep getting worse. This tends towards great man style history, which I don’t completely buy, but it is one approach. I think we mostly agree on this point.

(1) This is a system which could not, until an internal reorg – Deng, run 5 year plans that could keep its population from starving. Deng was a once in a lifetime occurrence, much like LKY in Singapore. Each leader since Deng gave himself greater powers in title, but bugger all came from it. The calls the other day about how China is playing a long game, and aren’t the Chinese super sneaky mandarins is low grade agit-prop, at about the same level as The Bachelor. Is Xi different, maybe, but I would not count on it.
(2) This is a system that just happens to be at its highest demographic dividend this year, i.e. this year is likely to be peak China in terms of effectiveness. It goes down from here. Also, most of its elites are busy leaving. What does this tell you?
(3) The investment that China is making can be thought of as a proto empire. So the best thing the great mandarins of Zhongnanhai could come up with was 2 bit mercantilism, last practiced by the British in Rhodesia 2 centuries ago?
(4) So far it has been in the interest of the American Empire to help China’s rise. Has that changed? Hard to say, but any belief that China will become an empire needs it to go though a process where the American Empire actively opposes it.

None of this means we don’t have significant problems. But take heart, smart people are working on it.

(1) As an example, where did the alt-right go? They made Brexit happen, and the got Trump elected and then disappeared. Does this seem likely to you? The progressive establishment went from global domination in 2015 to being mocked for being pedo’s in 2017. I can assure you there are individuals out there who are working to move our system to its next stable state. But the next decade or so will be hairy.

(2) So you know how inflation is super low, but we all really it is not. That establishment meme is currently being targeted. Once everyone agree’s we are having super large amounts of inflation, watch as the state religion panics and central banks raise rates globally. Season 10 is when it all goes down. We are probably at the end of Season 6 right now. To channel Boromir, one does not simply walk into Mordor, and try to bring down the global state religion.

p.s. Trump has been an unexpect success, no doubt about it. Originally, the thinking was he would be clone of Berlusconi. The ongoing implosion of Hollywood and the feminist cult is also an unexpected bonus. Enjoy: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net/ – spend some time looking through the posts and you’ll see what a gold mine it is.

Andrew Robb is Australians version of Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan during the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia. Just waiting for Australian version of the sergeant in the British military police who ended Heenans career as an officer.

This is all getting out of hand. Shanghai Sam has just established he is a naive political operator. Bbig deal, our parliament is stuffed full of naive brain dead party apparatchiks and muppets. That’s all and its why he has to go. I am happy to punt that he has already been issued with his marching instructions from Sussex Street HQ . They will be waiting until the middle of the Sydney Test to announce his departure from the Senate and his replacement has been vetted for the citizenry test.

As for the Turnbull’s smart-assed Privileges Committee referral, this breaches the first rule of politics: never call an inquiry unless you have first fixed the result. The notion that the ALP will lie down and accept this Mickey Mouse inquiry is fanciful. The lawyers in the ALP will be all over it like a rash, with QCs and researchers queuing up to have a go. Within weeks, the name Dastayari will have disappeared into history as a vague memory but the Turnbull Salem Trial debacle will be front page news. Remember this is man whose political acumen gave up us Gordon Gretch and who stuffs everything he touches from OneTel onwards., not to mind threatening Kerry Packer with a gun. Sound sensible judgment is not his finer point.

Anyway, any inquiry will be quickly wound up once the first shipload of “contaminated” beef is turned around at Shanghai or Australian milk products are found to be laced with tinnea. If the Indonesians can throw the National Party into a spin over the suspension of the live cattle export trade, the Chinese government can play that game harder and with even better cards before it even decides how much coal or iron ore it will buy from Australia in 2018/9.

People need to get a grip on reality. Dastayari’s skewering by the security establishment and its leaking to selected media in Fairfax and the ABC has more to do with getting the Banking Inquiry flip flop off the news. Coicidentally, it has stopped any media discussion of a particular senior ministers fling with a junior political assistant in his electoral office which is all over Twitter and Facebook but the MSM have politely turned the other way.

1. What Priviliges Committee referral are you talking about?
2. What hashtag are we following Bilious Blathering Bloviating Barnaby tribulations on please?
3. What’s this about Turnbull and a gun and Packer?
4. I think it’s entirely appropriate Dastyari is out. Doesn’t mean we can’t want a clean up in other areas.